The Republicans finally were being held accountable for both the budget impasse and the shutdowns, and the drop in their approval ratings led to a fracturing of the party’s united front. By January, Senator Bob Dole, likely looking ahead to the launch of his presidential campaign in New Hampshire, started talking compromise. Gingrich’s strategy of “playing chicken” with Bill had failed, and I felt great relief that we could reopen the government and get workers back on the payroll now that Bill had prevailed.

  As the second session of the 104th Congress opened on January 3, 1996, only three minor pieces of the Gingrich Contract had been signed into law. Bill had sustained eleven vetoes. He had managed to stave off disastrous cuts to Medicare and Medicaid and to save programs like AmeriCorps and Legal Aid services, which had been destined for the chopping block. By the end of the month both sides reached a compromise funding agreement and reopened the government.

  One institution unaffected by the shutdown was the Senate Banking Committee, whose work was deemed “essential.” Without pause, it continued to haul our friends, lawyers and associates up to the Hill to fish for evidence of wrongdoing, while VA hospitals were prohibited from treating most patients, and other government employees were furloughed without pay.

  On November 29, while we were in Europe, the Republicans’ key witness, L. Jean Lewis, had been crossexamined by Senator Paul Sarbanes of Maryland and the Democratic counsel on the D’Amato committee, Richard Ben-Veniste. Lewis was the RTC official who had filed a criminal referral in August 1992 with the FBI and the U.S. Attorney in Little Rock, naming as felony suspects not only the McDougals but everyone who contributed to a fundraiser McDougal held for Bill at Madison Guaranty in 1985. She listed Bill and me as possible witnesses. Ben-Veniste charged that Lewis was politically biased against us and had submitted this referral just before the 1992 election to affect the outcome.

  According to the final Whitewater Report published in 2002, this pre-election effort to implicate us in a criminal probe was encouraged by people in the Bush White House and Justice Department.

  To rebut her testimony before the Banking Committee, Ben-Veniste crossexamined Lewis intensely, suggesting that she was lying when she said she had accidentally made a lengthy tape recording of a conversation she had with an RTC official who visited Lewis at her Kansas City office. Ben-Veniste got Lewis to state that, while she was a conservative Republican, she had no political bias against Bill and had never called him a liar. He then presented a letter that she’d written in 1992 which made exactly that charge. Democrats also introduced evidence that Lewis had sought to market a line of T-shirts and mugs carrying messages that were critical of both Bill and me. Before the questioning concluded, Lewis collapsed and had to be helped from the hearing room.

  The general public heard little about this development in the ongoing Whitewater drama. Among the television networks, only C-SPAN covered the details of the Lewis appearance. Days after her memorable and self-destructing testimony, The New York Times continued to give credence to Lewis’s unsubstantiated accusations and to refer to her as a “star witness.” Undaunted by the facts, the D’Amato committee continued to probe my association with McDougal’s savings and loan. Ken Starr’s investigation was supposedly confidential, but his team was displaying a remarkable talent for calculated leaks to the media.

  In late 1995, Dick Morris came to see me to deliver a bizarre message: I was going to be indicted for something as yet undefined and “people close to Starr” suggested I accept the indictment and ask Bill to pardon me before trial. I assumed Morris was carrying water for his Republican clients or contacts, so I chose my words very carefully. “Tell your sources to report to Starr’s people that even though I have done nothing wrong, I’m well aware that, in the immortal words of Edward Bennett Williams, ‘a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich if he chooses.’ And if Starr does, I would never ask for a pardon. I will go to trial and show Starr up for the fraud he is.”

  “Are you sure you want me to say that?” Morris asked me.

  “Word for word,” I replied.

  In the ruckus over budgets and shutdowns, an important development in the Whitewater investigation passed almost unnoticed: Findings of the RTC report on Whitewater were finally made public just before Christmas. This independent report corroborated our contention that Bill and I had minimal involvement with the Whitewater investment and no liability in the collapse of Madison Guaranty. After examining forty-seven witnesses, compiling 200,000 documents and spending $3.6 million, the RTC investigators found no evidence of misconduct on our part and no factual basis for any aspect of the Whitewater “scandal.”

  Like Jean Lewis’s discredited testimony, the report was minimally covered in the news media. USA Today didn’t acknowledge it at all; The Washington Post buried the news in paragraph 11 of a front-page story about Whitewater subpoenas and The New York Times ran a few paragraphs on the report. Republicans dismissed the RTC investigation as too narrow and continued their hearings.

  I was encouraged by this news when I met with David Kendall at the White House early on January 4, 1996, for one of our periodic catch-up sessions. David always tried to keep things light at our briefings by photocopying his favorite political cartoons for me or clipping the most outrageous tabloid stories, such as “Hillary Gives Birth to Alien Baby”

  or whatever they dreamed up that week.

  We met in the Family Room, between the large master bedroom and the Yellow Oval Room on the second floor of the residence. The Bushes and Reagans relaxed and watched television there, and Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt had each used it as a bedroom.

  Bill and I furnished it with a television and card table along with a comfortable couch and armchair. Midway through the meeting, an usher knocked on the door and handed David a note, which he folded up and put in his pocket. When we finished our conversation, David left.

  The next morning David called and asked if he could come see me.

  “Something has come up,” he said.

  David explained that the note he’d been given the day before was from Carolyn Huber, asking him to stop by her East Wing office on his way out. Carolyn, our longtime assistant in Arkansas, came to Washington to handle our personal correspondence and to organize, catalog and archive personal papers―everything from old school report cards to vacation photos to major speeches―that were now stored in hundreds of boxes throughout the residence and at a special White House storage facility in Maryland.

  David often asked Carolyn to help locate documents requested by the independent counsel, and, throughout the previous months, she had turned over thousands of pages of records from our boxes and her files.

  When he arrived at her office, she handed him a sheaf of papers. David quickly realized what they were: a 1992 computer printout detailing the legal work I and others had done at the Rose Law Firm for Madison Guaranty back in 1985-86. Although Madison Guaranty billing records were included in the Special Counsel’s subpoenas, the logical place to find them was in the records of the Rose Firm and Madison Guaranty. Their absence in our records did not surprise David or me, although we were anxious for them to appear, since I was certain they would support my recollection about what little legal work I had done. I was relieved that they had finally been found.

  “Where on earth have they been?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know,” said David. “Carolyn was going through a box of papers in her office and came across them. As soon as she realized what they were, she sent me the note.”

  “What does this mean?” I asked David.

  “Well, the good news is we found them. The bad news is this gives the press and prosecutors the chance to go wild again.”

  And they did. William Safire, a former Nixon speechwriter, called me a “congenital liar” in his New York Times column. My picture appeared on the cover of Newsweek under the headline SAINT OR SINNER? And there was renewed talk of a grand jury subpoena and a possible indictment in the Whitewater investigation.

  The copy of the billing records, we later concluded, was probably made during the 1992 campaign so that Bill’s campaign staff and the Rose Law Firm could respond to the media questions about Madison Guaranty, Jim McDougal and Whitewater. Vmce Foster, who handled the queries at the time, had scribbled notes on the documents. I believed they would corroborate what I had been saying all along: that my work for McDougal’s savings and loan so many years ago had been minimal, in time and compensation.

  On January 9, 1996, with the careful help of White House ushers, the Green Room was transformed into a temporary television studio for my interview with Barbara Walters.

  Technicians snaked cables along the floor and set up equipment that bathed the room in a golden light so gentle and flattering that even the powdered-wig portrait of Benjamin Franklin above the fireplace seemed to glow with youth. Barbara and I made pleasant small talk while the crew adjusted the sound levels.

  This interview had been scheduled for January 9, 1996, long in advance, to promote It Takes a Village on the eve of its publication. Now I expected Barbara, whom I admired and liked, had other topics on her mind. It was not the best way to kick off an eleven-city book tour, but I welcomed the chance to respond to the latest volley of allegations. When the cameras began to roll, she got straight to the point.

  “Mrs. Clinton, instead of your new book being the issue, you have become the issue.

  How did you get into this mess, where your whole credibility is being questioned?”

  “Oh, I ask myself that every day, Barbara,” I said, “because it’s very surprising and confusing to me. But we’ve had questions raised for the last four years, and eventually they’re answered and they go away and more questions come up and we’ll just keep doing our best to answer them.”

  “Are you distressed?”

  “Occasionally I get a little distressed, a little sad, a little angry, irritated. I think that’s only natural. But I know that that’s part of the territory and we’ll just keep plowing through and trying to get to the end of this.”

  When Barbara Walters asked me about the missing records, I said: “You know, a month ago, people were jumping up and down because the billing records were lost and they thought somebody might have destroyed them. Now the records are found and they’re jumping up and down. But I’m glad the records were found. I wish they had been found a year or two ago, because they verify what I’ve been saying from the very beginning.

  I worked about an hour a week for fifteen months. That was not a lot of work for me, certainly.”

  Barbara had trouble visualizing why the documents were so hard to find.

  “What does it look like up there with your records?”

  “It’s a mess… .”

  “That’s hard to understand.”

  “But I think people do need to understand that there are millions of pieces of paper in the White House, and for more than two years now, people have been diligently searching.”

  It was difficult to convey the disarray we had lived with ever since moving into the White House. We had arrived in 1993 with all of our worldly possessions haphazardly packed in boxes, largely because we didn’t own a home where we could store things.

  Shortly after we moved into the residence, we found ourselves in the midst of a major renovation of the heating and airconditioning systems to bring the White House up to environmental energy standards. We had to stuff boxes into closets and spare rooms while workers put new ducts into the ceilings and walls. It seemed that each week we had to move around boxes again, just to stay one step ahead of the construction.

  During the summer of 1995, duct work was being done on the roof and on the third floor, an informal area with extra guest rooms, the Solarium, an office, an exercise room, a laundry room and several storage areas. One of these, which we called the “book room,”

  was a storage area where we had built shelves to handle our overflow of books. With several doors leading from it to the laundry room, exercise room and a small hallway used by the residence staff, it was one of the busiest spots in the residence, with people marching through at all hours of the day and night. We had set up tables in the book room for the boxes of papers and personal effects that were regularly shuttled from an off-site warehouse to the White House and back again so that they could be examined and cataloged.

  Carolyn Huber also had several file cabinets in the room for papers she was organizing.

  And complicating matters, the tables were often covered with drop-cloths to protect them from plaster and dust raining down from the ceiling during construction work.

  The ongoing search for documents in response to subpoenas added to the mess. David Kendall asked us to set up a copying machine in the book room so that he and his assistants could copy documents before turning them over to the Office of the Independent Counsel. And that was where, in the summer of 1995, Carolyn later testified that she found a sheaf of folded papers on one of the tables. Carolyn thought they were old records that had been left for her to file. Unaware of their significance, she tossed them into a box of other records that was taken to her office, already jammed with boxes she planned to sort through when she had more time. Months later, when she started sifting through all of these items, she unfolded the papers and recognized them as the long-lost billing records.

  Carolyn did the honorable thing by calling David immediately to tell him about her discovery. She had been doing her best to stay ahead of an avalanche of paperwork and subpoena requests, and by her own admission, it sometimes took her a while to get through it all. I have not talked to Carolyn about the billing records or the investigation because I never wanted to be accused of influencing her testimony. But I trust her completely and know that her oversight was an innocent and understandable mistake.

  Senator D’Amato’s committee immediately proceeded to look for evidence-never found-of obstruction and perjury in the discovery of the billing records. The committee immediately requested additional funding for a two-or three-month extension to complete its hearings, which had already cost taxpayers nearly $900,000. A few months later, the RTC filed a supplemental report confirming that the billing records supported my account of my legal activities. I certainly had no reason to conceal them and regretted that they had not been found earlier.

  And so it went. The hearings and the media coverage continued, and every time I sat down for an interview with another radio host or morning talk show personality to discuss It Takes a Village, I was asked about the billing records. The only bright moments that month were my appearances in bookstores, schools, children’s hospitals and other programs supporting children and families around the country. The crowds were huge and the audiences warm and supportive, further evidence of the disconnect between Washington and the rest of the nation.

  This disconnect is one of the reasons I wanted to write It Takes a Village. When I thought about the growing pressures on children in America, it struck me how ineffectual the increasingly partisan rhetoric in Washington was in solving the problems that these children face.

  Many of my beliefs about what is best for children and families don’t fall easily into any category of politics or ideology, and a lot of the people I met on my book tour said that they felt the same way. The people who stood in line for hours didn’t want to talk about the most recent episode of mudslinging in the nation’s capital. They wanted to talk about how hard it is to find quality, affordable child care; the challenges of raising children without the support of extended families; the pressures of raising children in a mass culture that too often celebrates risky behaviors and distorts values; the importance of good schools and affordable college tuitions; and a range of issues weighing on the minds of parents and other adults in today’s fast-changing world. I was heartened by these conversations, and hoped that my book would help promote a national conversation about what is best for America’s children.

  It Takes a Village offered information about ideas and programs developed at the community level that were making a difference in the lives of children and families. Often, a model program in one community isn’t replicated elsewhere because there are few channels for communication. A concerned group of parents in Atlanta, for example, might benefit from learning about an innovative afterschool program for at-risk teens in Los Angeles. I wanted to give visibility to successful grassroots efforts that would resonate in communities around the country. I also hoped I could generate royalties for children’s charities since I was giving all the author’s proceeds away. In the end, I was able to contribute nearly one million dollars.

  My book tour also offered moments that were personally comforting. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, on January 17, dozens of people showed up at the bookstore wearing “Hillary Fan Club” T-shirts. Ruth and Gene Love, a retired couple from Silver Spring, Maryland, had started the club in their kitchen in 1992. There were hundreds of members around the country and a few international chapters. The Loves, aptly named, became wonderful friends who invariably seemed to know when I needed a boost. They would send out their “fans” to greet me with smiles, T-shirts and homemade signs when I traveled.

  In San Francisco, James Carville hosted a dinner for me at a restaurant he had just bought and invited some of my closest friends to come, mostly to cheer me up. My freespirited friend Susie Buell said she didn’t follow all of the dramas going on back in Washington, but she did have something to say to me: “Bless your heart.” That was all I needed to hear.

  During my book tour, I spoke at my alma mater, Wellesley College, on January 19, 1996, and spent the night at the gracious home of its superb President, Diana Chapman Walsh. The President’s house sits on the shores of Lake Waban, and I got up early and went for a long walk along the trail that encircles the lake. I had just returned when David phoned to tell me that Kenneth Starr had issued a subpoena to call me before the grand jury to testify about the missing billing records. This time there would be no quiet deposition in the White House. I would have to testify before the full grand jury the following week. I was upset, yet I knew I couldn’t express my feelings to anyone other than Bill or my lawyers.